Part of our Learn + Participate education programme: What impact did the revolutions have on British literature? This workshop explores Russia’s revolutionary tradition and its 1917 revolutions through the work of Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells, Somerset Maugham and other icons of British literature.

Shortlisted for the 2019 Pushkin House Russian Book Prize Katja Petrowskaja’s family story Maybe Esther is inextricably entangled with the history of 20th-century Europe. There is her great-uncle, who shot a German diplomat in Moscow in 1932 and was sentenced to death. There is her Ukrainian grandfather, who disappeared during WWII and reappeared forty years later. And there is her great-grandmother – whose name may or may not have been Esther – who was too old and frail to leave Kiev when the Jews there were rounded up, and was killed by a Nazi outside her house. Part of the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize 2019 events programme.

Ariadna Arendt (1906-1997) was a remarkable Russian sculptor and memoirist, who, like Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, managed to overcome the consequences of a tragic accident and live a full and creative life. This event is organised by Pushkin Club and all are welcome.

The ‘impeccable spy’ Richard Sorge was a fanatical Communist who infiltrated and influenced the highest echelons of German, Chinese and Japanese society in the years leading up to and including the Second World War. In his new book, Owen Matthews takes a sweeping historical perspective and draws on a wealth of declassified Soviet archives – along with testimonies from those who knew and worked with Sorge – to rescue the riveting story of the man described by Ian Fleming as 'the most formidable spy in history'. Matthews will be in conversation with author and journalist Sonia Purnell.

This talk draws on Elisabeth’s experiences as a post graduate student in Leningrad (1967-69), in particular around the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact in August 1968 when she was in Leningrad, cut off from communication with the outside world. In 2015 she was part of a team looking at archive holdings from BBC Monitoring, to assess their value for future historians. These were the first rough translations of broadcasts from Czechoslovakia during the invasion, which were the basis of the published reports prepared by BBC Monitoring. They turned out to be extraordinarily fresh and expressive, and this talk explains their significance. This event is organised by the GB-Russia Society and tickets are only available from the GB-Russia Society website: www.gbrussia.org

In a sequel to his sold-out talk last year, Mark Galeotti - author of The Vory: Russia's Super Mafia (Yale, 2018), one of the shortlisted books for the 2019 Pushkin House Book Prize - returns to the shadows. Whereas before he looked especially at the gory past of the Russian vorovskoi mir, its feared underworld subculture, now he will be turning his eyes to the current situation at home and abroad, and its likely evolution. While one embittered Russian investigator told him that everyone is a gangster now, Mark will explain why he remains "unfashionably optimistic" about Russia's future. Part of the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize 2019 events programme.

Join us for an evening with Alexander Nakhimovsky who will speak about the language of the Soviet peasantry and what it reveals of their world view. All through the Soviet period up to the 1980s, the peasantry was one of the most censored topics in scholarly and political discourse. Only in the 1990s were the constraints lifted. Scores of researchers--linguists, ethnographers, historians, and sociologists—at once started looking for, and recording, peasants who remembered pre-kolkhoz life and language. Alexander Nakhimovsky has a forthcoming book on the language and history of the Russian peasantry. This event is organised by Pushkin Club and all are welcome.

Part of our Music Salon programme & our ongoing Romanov Season: This concert consists entirely of music written by the member of the Russian Royal Family as well as music dedicated to them. Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Narpavnik and Grechaninov all wrote songs on the words by Grand Duke Konstantin Romanov, himself a decent composer. Coronation marches, duets and solo piano pieces forms another major part of this unique concert commemorating the 400th anniversary of the House of Romanovs.

Pushkin House's monthly workshop, led by top translator Robert Chandler. All translators, at any stage of their careers, are welcome to attend this Russian-to-English translation workshop; the only requirement is fluent English and a good reading knowledge of Russian.

Join us for an evening with one of Russia’s best contemporary writers Maxim Osipov, who lives and practices medicine in a town ninety miles outside Moscow. He will speak about his new book Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Stories. In the tradition of Anton Chekhov and William Carlos Williams, he draws on his experiences in medicine to write stories of great subtlety and striking insight. With translator Alex Fleming. This event is organised by Pushkin Club and all are welcome.

On the morning of 26 April 1986 Europe witnessed the worst nuclear disaster in history: the explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Soviet Ukraine. The outburst put the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation. In the end, less than five percent of the reactor's fuel escaped, but that was enough to contaminate over half of Europe with radioactive fallout. In Chernobyl, Serhii Plokhy recreates these events in all of their drama, telling the stories of the firefighters, scientists, engineers, workers, soldiers, and policemen who found themselves caught in a nuclear Armageddon and succeeded in doing the seemingly impossible: extinguishing the nuclear inferno and putting the reactor to sleep. Part of the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize 2019 events programme.

Join the shortlisted authors and jurors for the unveiling of the 2019 Pushkin House Russian Book Prize Winner in the atmospheric Charterhouse, London. The prize, now in its 7th year, rewards the very best non-fiction writing about the Russian speaking world. Tickets now on sale.

The Soviet Union was a notoriously closed society until Stalin’s death in 1953. Then, in the mid-1950s, a torrent of Western novels, films, and paintings invaded Soviet streets and homes, acquiring heightened emotional significance. To See Paris and Die is a history of this momentous opening to the West. Eleonory Gilburd explores the pleasure, longing, humiliation, and anger that Soviet citizens felt as they found themselves in the midst of this cross-cultural encounter. The main protagonists of To See Paris and Die are small-town teachers daydreaming of faraway places, college students vicariously discovering a wider world, and factory engineers striving for self-improvement. They invested Western imports with political and personal significance, transforming foreign texts into intimate belongings. Part of the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize 2019 events programme.

A young and disillusioned British diplomat abandons his diplomatic career, spends his own money, and risks his life to make a documentary on a journey of faith and war in Ukraine. The country is riven by indescribable events, variously categorised as an EU-inspired and US-organised revolution, a Russian invasion, a civil war, a war of lies and misinformation, a war where thousands of people have died, which has created over a million refugees, and a war at the heart of Christendom which rips the very geopolitical foundations of Europe to shreds. Followed by Q&A with the director.

Russian journalism does not exist in isolation from the world. This evening brings scholars and media practitioners from different countries to the United Kingdom to add a wider perspective on the logics of newsmaking in Russia. This event is based on a British Academy funded project ‘Self-censorship in post-Socialist states’ (University of Leeds & Aston University).

To coincide with the Tate’s new exhibition of Natalia Goncharova’s paintings, Pushkin House presents a talk by University of Sheffield academic Adam Fergus on Marina Tsvetaeva’s commentary on Goncharova’s paintings, and the interactions and connections between these two monumental figures of the avant-garde.

This talk explores Bulgakov’s life (1891-1940) and The Master and Margarita as a story of surviving in Stalinist Russia. Presented by Dr.Olga Voronina who has taught at the Universities of Leeds, Nottingham, St. Andrews and University College Oxford before returning to The School of Slavonic & East European Studies at UCL in 2017. This event is organised by the GB-Russia Society and tickets are only available from the GB-Russia Society website: www.gbrussia.org

1983 was a supremely dangerous year - even more dangerous than 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the US, President Reagan massively increased defence spending, described the Soviet Union as an 'evil empire' and announced his 'Star Wars' programme, calling for a shield in space to defend the US from incoming missiles. This is an extraordinary and largely unknown Cold War story of spies and double agents, of missiles being readied, of intelligence failures, misunderstandings and the panic of world leaders. Taylor Downing tells for the first time the gripping but true story of how near the world came to the brink of nuclear war in 1983. Part of the Pushkin House Book Prize 2019 events programme.

David Brummell will give a talk about the life and work of Yuri Dombrovsky (1909 -1978). Yuri Dombrovsky is comparatively unknown in the West. However, his two main literary works, The Keeper of Antiquities, and its sequel, the Faculty of Useless Knowledge, along with Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak and The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, stand as the greatest achievements of Russian literature of the 20th century. This event is organised by Pushkin Club and all are welcome.

In English, with a recital of Dombrovsky's poems in Russian and English translation

Join the award-winning writer Sara Wheeler for an illustrated talk about her new book Mud and Stars: Travels with Pushkin and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age. To write this book Sara travelled across eight time zones in Russia, from rinsed north-western beetroot fields and far-eastern Arctic tundra where Chukchi still hunt walrus to the cauldron of ethnic soup that is the Caucasus. Her guides were the writers of the Golden Age, Pushkin to Tolstoy via Gogol and Turgenev.

Two Russian-British composers, Gabriel Prokofiev and Lydia Kavina, as well as the pianist Thomas Ang, are presenting a program of music for theremin and electronics. The theremin, invented in 1919, started the era of electronic music, which made a dramatic development through the century. This unique music instrument, controlled without a physical touch, is still one of the most intriguing music phenomenon. Part of our programme dedicated to 65th anniversary of Pushkin House.

Vasily Grossman’s 1960 novel Life and Fate has been hailed as a 20th century War and Peace. It is, however, only the second half of a dilogy, the first half of which was published in 1952. Robert Chandler will talk about translating the first novel, Stalingrad, and German-Ukrainian historian Tatiana Dettmer will discuss her own very recent discovery: the existence of a real-life model for the hero of the two novels — Lev Shtrum, a nuclear physicist working in Kiev in the 1920s and early 1930s. This event is organised by Pushkin Club, and all are welcome.

Join Katrina Kollegaeva from Russian Revels for an illustrated talk devoted to one of the most successful 19th and early 20th-century Russian cookbooks, A Gift to Young Housewives, more commonly know as "Molokhovets". Compiled by Elena Ivanovna Molokhovets in 1861, this cookbook has been continually revised: from its first edition at the time of the emancipation of the serfs to the Communist Revolution of 1917. The book was well known in Russian households during its publication and for decades to follow. It has been republished in 2003. "Molokhovets" inspired canapes and a glass of wine are included in the ticket price.

Part of our Music Salon programme: In her Pushkin House recital programme Latvian pianist Antonina Suhanova explores creative and personal bonds between early 20th century Eastern European composers. Brought together by their love of music and mutual teachers, Kalnins, Vitols, Arensky, Prokofiev, Rachmaninov and Siloti socialised, conversed and inspired each other’s masterpieces, engaging in fierce disputes. The programme invites the audience to reflect on the diversity of the styles of these five composers united by their love and appreciation of the Russian musical tradition.

Lomasko, the daughter of an artist-decorator working in Soviet times, describes herself as 'the last Soviet artist' as her art draws heavily on the Soviet tradition of illustration and graphic design. In this talk she will reflect on her own work, as well as that of celebrated Russian contemporary artists such as Irina Korina and Pavel Otdelnov, who were educated by teachers established in the Soviet system and continue to work with Soviet themes, images and styles.

Please come along to our spring Book Fair, which as usual will take place in our library. We have an abundance of new and second-hand books for sale, all of which will be discounted for this day only. This event is FREE, just turn up!

Pushkin House's monthly workshop, led by top translator Robert Chandler. All translators, at any stage of their careers, are welcome to attend this Russian-to-English translation workshop; the only requirement is fluent English and a good reading knowledge of Russian.

What makes Vladimir Putin powerful? Graeme Robertson and Sam Greene's new book tells the story of Putin’s power from the bottom-up, through the voices and experiences of ordinary Russians and elites alike. Unearthing the ambitions, emotions and divisions that fuel Russian politics, Putin v the People illuminates the crossroads at which Russia has arrived and shows why Putin’s rule may be more fragile than it appears. In conversation with Catherine Belton, the FT's former Moscow correspondent.

Between East and West, between strong traditions and today’s innovations, between the nostalgic melodies of duduk and the beat of modern jazz, is Yerevan. Six musicians, six styles, six personal stories behind one of the most musical cities in the former Soviet Union. This documentary film captures Tatiana Daniliyants’ ten years of research and an attentive eye for these musicians’ own stories and their extraordinary music.

An evening with Russian human rights activist and publicist Elena Sannikov who will be speaking about repression in Russia and some of the most interesting and remarkable stories and individuals to be found among those imprisoned for their political views or religious beliefs. This event is organised by Pushkin Club and all are welcome.

Pushkin House and Stage Russia HD present a screening of Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov, as reimagined by Director Rimas Tuminas. A Golden Mask Winner for Best Drama, featuring the inimitable Sergey Makovetskiy as Voynitsky.

Part of our Learn + Participate education programme: The Russian Revolution of 1917 changed much more than “just” the political system. This workshop explores modernist innovation in Russian literature and visual art during the 1910s and provides a link between aesthetic and political developments.

From the producers of Anastasia (***** Evening Standard) and An Evening with the Romanovs comes this story about a type of Russian that we all-too-rarely see on our screens – a good one. ‘Bad Russians’ are a staple on our screens, and no one knows this better than Andrew Byron – he has made a career out of playing them. But surely not all Russians are bad? This story, told by Andrew seeks to tip the scales in the other direction.

Join us for a Victory Day Concert with Mazaika Duo. You will hear songs that are known and loved by everybody in Russia and abroad. The message of these songs was engendered by the war, but at their heart is not the war, but a celebration of the world that they are supposed to save.

Part of our Mother Tongue Season: In spite of the present hostile environment, there has been an explosion of queer artistic practice in recent years in Russia. In this talk academic and author Vlad Strukov will explore how recent legislation in Russia has affected cultural production, especially the visual arts. He will also analyse recent exhibitions of contemporary art to reveal the actual scope and dynamics of queer art in Russia. The evening will be hosted by Dr. Galina Miazhevich of Cardiff University.

Join our wine expert Tanya Nesterova for an evening dedicated to Fyodor Dostoevsky. Like many cultured Russians at the time, Dostoevsky travelled a lot, albeit sometimes under hard circumstances. During the tasting, we’ll follow in his footsteps and learn about the wines he used to drink or could have drunk. We’ll talk about the history of those wines, taste the styles of wines traditionally produced in the areas where he stayed and were popular with Russians in the past and in the present.

Set to an edgy hip hop beat, Here & Now is an impressive feature film debut for its director Roma Shumunov. His sensitively-portrayed social drama is told through the eyes of Andrey, a young Russian immigrant struggling to live with his family in the slums of Ashdod and assimilate into Israeli society. HERE AND NOW is part of SERET Film Festival in London.

Join us for a delightful afternoon of Russian piano music as part of the UK - Russia Year of Music 2019. The programme will include the gorgeous Sonata No. 2 by Rachmaninov and the lyrical and mysterious Sonata No. 9 by Prokofiev as well as several works for piano duo: the Valse from the Cinderella Suite, Sviridov's beautiful Valse from the Snowstorm Suite, Khachatutyan's Valse from the Masquerade Suite and other works.

All translators, at any stage of their careers, are welcome to attend this one-day Russian-to-English translation workshop; the only requirement is fluent English and a reading knowledge of Russian. We encourage a truly collaborative approach, which is helpful and enjoyable. We will spend at least half of the time looking at a passage from a story by Teffi.

Part of our ongoing Romanov Season:2019 marks the 145th anniversary of the only direct marriage between the British Royal and Russian Imperial families; the wedding in January 1874 of Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh and Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna. In this illustrated talk, Stephen Patterson, co-curator of the current exhibition at The Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace Russia: Royalty and the Romanovs will explore thenegotiations for the wedding, the ceremonies and celebrations in St Petersburg, Moscow, Windsor and London and the art in the Royal Collection associated with the dynastic union. This event is jointly organised with Friends of the Hermitage UK.

Join us for an evening with filmmaker Marianna Yarovskaya director of ground breaking documentary film Women of the Gulag, that tells the compelling and tragic stories of the female last survivors of the Gulag, the brutal system of repression and terror that devastated the Soviet population under Stalin. Yarovskaya will talk about the making of the film, how she found the women and interacted with them. She will also show outtakes of the film, and go into some of the stories that didn't make it into the film. In conversation with Lucy Ash.

Vladimir Vysotsky, though hugely popular in Russia, is almost unknown in the rest of the world. Against this injustice stands US-based singer-songwriter Vadim Astrakhan and his long-running project translating Vysotsky’s songs into English. Now Astrakhan, on tour in Europe, brings ‘Vysotsky in English’ to the UK, hosted by Pushkin House. This promises to be a cheerful and original event, where English-speakers can hear and learn about Russia’s bard, and Russians can enjoy his music from a new perspective.

Part of our Mother Tongue Season: In this talk Alexander Kondakov will explore the political economy of violence in Russia and beyond, focusing on the structure and drivers of the current sexual counter-revolution by studying emotions manifested in violence against queer populations in Russia. The evening will be introduced by Dr. Richard Mole, UCL, who will also chair a Q&A session with the audience.

Amid the chaos and violence of the 1905 Revolution in Russia, the Tsar’s opponents printed and distributed vast quantities of picture postcards. Easy to share, hide and smuggle, postcards were a way to beat the censor and spread a message of defiance. In this talk, author Tobie Mathew will draw on his extensive research into this topic, that led to the publication of this startling and original book. Mathew will give a richly illustrated overview of opposition postcards under the Tsars, showing how this vibrant new form of communication served to spread revolutionary belief and disrupt the Imperial status quo.

Join us for an evening with psychotherapist, Russian speaker and former BBC foreign Correspondent Mark Brayne for an illustrated journey into the heart of Russia. This event is organised by the GB-Russia Society and tickets are only available from the GB-Russia Society website: www.gbrussia.org

Take your first steps towards speaking fluent Russian! Come along and meet the teachers and staff of the Russian Language Centre: find out more about the January term (starting 15th April 2019), browse course materials, learn more about taking a Russian language examination, take a free taster class for beginners, attend the free Russian exam Q and A session, and more!

Part of our Learn + Participate education programme: This workshop gives versatile insight into contemporary Russian society. Covering politics, economics, demographics, media and civil society. Discover the role of London and what the impact of economic sanctions is on Russia’s elites.

Please join us for the launch of ‘Eyewitness 1917’. We start at 7pm with a short readingof extracts from the book, by professional actors Jed Aukin and Sarah Breen (now fully booked). From 7.30pm the launch itself will begin and you are welcome to join us to celebrate the publication of this book.